Shingo Newsletter | February 2008 |
| Learning How to See! | ||
Knowing how to see is not as simple as it sounds; it reminds me of an old proverb that says, “A fish doesn’t know that it swims in water.” Also we are often not able to see the enormous amount of waste that fills our manufacturing sites or our offices. These wastes are now classical: inventory, motion, transportation, inspection, defects, rework, waiting, the process itself, over–production, not utilizing people’s creative talents, and manager’s resistance to change. Years ago, we could not see these wastes at all, we are now fortunate in that respect. Unfortunately, most of us are patterned and we come to work each day and only see what we saw yesterday. It takes a concerted effort to break these patterns as well as a strong desire to overcome our resistance to change. It’s hard work, but you can do it. I see managers under such extreme pressure to produce profits in any given month that they can not see the improvement opportunities right in front of them; they don’t know that they are swimming in water. Mr. Ohno would insist that leaders spend their time learning how to see on the factory floor. A few months back, I was walking on a shop floor with a company president. I saw a worker picking up small metal buttons, one by one, in order to polish them. Next to him was a tray with around 300 of these buttons. I turned to the president and said, “How can you make any money on this operation? Surely you can’t charge your client what it costs you to polish each button separately.” I turned to the worker and asked, “Isn’t there a better way to do this?” He stopped polishing and led us to another part of the factory where he picked up a flat metal fixture with 100 small holes in it. “I can normally use this fixture to polish 100 buttons at the same time, but the part I’m working on is a different size and much too small for this fixture,” he said. The worker knew what to do but was not empowered to build a new fixture. He felt that his supervisor would not listen to him and build an appropriate fixture. At another plant, I saw a worker inspecting material after it was powder coated. I asked him what kind of defects he was finding and he told me that the powder coating didn’t always adhere to the surface of the part. I asked why he thought that was happening, and his reply provided me with insight. “One reason,” he said, “is that we use old hooks that have too much paint on them.” “Why don’t you just remove the paint from the old hooks before using them again,” I asked. He looked at me strangely and said, “Management doesn’t want to buy new hooks and it probably cost too much money to remove the old paint, even after only one use.” No company wants to send bad products to their customers, that much is obvious. Unfortunately, when a company can not “see” properly and management is reluctant to ask for input and opinions from the workers, it becomes inevitable. On my last study mission to Japan in September of 2007, I visited Hino Motors and saw a supervisor spend 15 minutes recording a worker on the truck assembly line with a video camera. I was curious, because Hino is a Toyota company and Toyota has been doing JIT for over 40 years. Why in the world were they video taping a worker in 2007? I found out that the supervisor would take the video into a meeting room and invite engineers and the worker to look for slight variations in how the worker built each truck. When they saw a difference from one truck to the next, they would ask the worker to explain why. From there they would try to determine the best way. Was the worker following the standard or was the worker creating a new one? Naturally, standards represent the best way to accomplish a task. Toyota standardizes everything and the worker performs exactly the way the standard tells them to do it, but the worker has the right to improve the standard. Even though they were looking at very small variations, they wanted to continuously improve the process. They have been doing this for over 40 years. Video recording workers is a great process to reduce the waste of motion. It goes back to the origins of Lean, with Frederick Taylor’s time studies and Frank Gilbreth’s motion studies. They both wanted to improve the worker’s motion within the context of reducing fatigue while boosting production. All too often, we in America only look for the big changes, and neglect the real success opportunities to take waste out of the process every single day. I recommend that you take out the video camera and get out on the factory floor, or wherever your workplace is, and look for the waste of motion. You should be looking for very small opportunities for improvement; there are jewels of waste just waiting for you to see them. You should still run the Kaizen Blitzes or use Six Sigma to get after those big wastes, but if you really want to do continuous improvement, then involve all workers every day to find things to make better. Using video is a very powerful medium to see things differently. |
||
|
Please add newsletter@shingosweepstakes.com to your address book or safe list to ensure that you get our newsletter each month. If you no longer wish to receive our monthly newsletter, please click unsubscribe below.
|